From collection Candidates
Tennie C. Claflin announced her intention to run for Congress from the Eighth Congressional district of New York in 1872. She made this announcement at a meeting of the German-American Progressive Society in New York City on August 11, 1871. Claflin gave a speech supporting the rights of the individual, drinking of beer on Sundays, and announcing that, if she received a majority of the votes, her campaign would be a test case for the election of women to federal office. Claflin declared that: "no law . . . either forbids the people to elect a woman to an office, or which forbids her to accept it." Claflin was not elected. Tennie C. Claflin was a sister of Victoria Woodhull who ran for U.S. president in 1872. Woodhull and Claflin worked together in New York as stockbrokers, opening a business, gaining fame, fortune, and notoriety. The two women shared similar views on women's rights, free love, divorce, and other social reforms. Victoria and Tennie C. started Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, a newspaper and platform for their progressive views on women's rights, socialism, sex education, and dress reform.
